Hayfitz and the intimate candle flame shadows of "Curl"

 

"selfish and haunted / just being honest / I'm / selfish and haunted just being honest..."


The acoustic picking behind crystalline drones of "Curl", by LA-raised, Berlin-based by way of Brooklyn artist Hayfitz, has a 1970's folk sweep and the Lesley Duncan penned 'Love Song' from Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection came to mind. The faint connection quickly evaporated when Hayfitz intensely intimate, fractured vocals come in. And while I still feel glimmers of a 70's folk rock motif in my mind, the growing emotional embers offer more blood letting. The very moving vocal countenance that, at times, feel self harmonized, tonally shifts from gut punches to gorgeous almost surreal imagining against a stunning spatial spread of percussion, string orchestrations, plucks of sound bouncing off swells of sounds and the stir of sounds in repose too. The song is absolutely beautiful and the singing, from whispered to more blatant, is the emotional glue here.

Like the intense intimacies of "Curl" it would be best to share intimate details of how events and a special someone have shaped this song and others. This is where I resort to cut and pasting because it would be crass to repurpose these special words.

From Liner Notes (bracketed):  

[“Curl,” is the fourth and final single from Hayfitz’s sophomore album, "Everything Else". It’s about Hayfitz not being able to get past his unrequited queer love for his collaborator-turned best friend Sam Cope of whom he eventually co-produced and recorded this very song with and how it would resurface during every one of their interactions.

“I knew that as soon as I admitted to Sam what it was all about, that it was no longer going to be just hypothetical. “It was a very dark internal chapter for me. But it had to happen one way or another as far as me telling him,” states Hayfitz.

At twenty-five, Hayfitz was questioning his sexuality and confronting the consequences of his response to Cope’s rejection and the falling out of their friendship.

"For one thing," says Hayfitz, " I didn't think that we were going to be friends again, necessarily. For another, I didn't think we were going to make music together again. And then I definitely didn't think that both of these things would happen. So, I don't take anything for granted at this point."

After a two-year period of silence followed by an eventual reconciliation, Hayfitz and Cope finally reunited in the fall of 2021 to produce a set of songs as lush as they are intimate, a near-chronological depiction of their story. The album was recorded outside Pittsburgh at the cabin of their close friend, with the musicians having hauled out a carload of gear from Brooklyn and set up their studio in a large, fully windowed three season porch.]  

This is the second song from Hayfitz that I have written about. He is one of those artists that produces work that will likely always touch me. He is someone that I have a feeling is a good person, a highly emotional soul and hopefully we will be able to speak sometime. 

- Robb Donker Curtius

THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM 

https://www.facebook.com/callmehayfitz/

https://open.spotify.com/artist/6Ll2krEOObQ8m7QFbmG10y

https://www.instagram.com/_hayfitz_/

https://hayfitz.bandcamp.com/album/everything-else

https://twitter.com/_hayfitz_?lang=en

https://hayfitz.com/


The most gentle indie-folk out of Berlin ~ sophomore LP, 'Everything Else' out October 2023. Featured on playlists by La Blogetheque, Spotify, Alexrainbird, TIDAL, Sonderhouse, and more.

Hayfitz, singer songwriter, indie pop, folk, ballads, storyteller, sophomore LP "Everything Else", single "Curl", spatial beauty, acoustic shapes, pain in repose,